My blog has mostly been silent; it's tough to summon the words except when posting in angry response to something someone else has said.

And I don't even have cable; i'm just getting the web and newspaper coverage.

Well, I said y’all, not all y’all.

(N.B.: Gwenda, Christopher, Jeff, Tim, Will, any other southern readers out there: obviously as an often-expatriate Californian descendant of, as my grandmother put it, Scotch-Irish Canadian Yankees, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing with these words, I just feel a desperate need for a second person plural. Please help.)

I don't get the news channels in my nearly non-existant cable package. Not that I watched those channels when I did get them. I stopped after the Seattle earthquake. You remember that one, David, it nearly wiped Seattle off the map. At least that's the impression one got from CNN.

Hey, at my place it knocked a couple of bottles of wine off a shelf. They didn’t break, but they could have!

David, the second-person plural seems to vary a bit. "All y'all" is valid, I think, but not one I remember running into. The only sin, so far as I'm concerned, is using "y'all" when there's clearly only one person involved. And I've had some folks online who claim to be southerners say that's all right, too.

Second-person plural is a mighty useful thing, IMNSHO. And, as I get older, I find myself sometimes wishing we had clearer versions of the polite and the intimate "you." But I think we usually do that well enough with the words around it. I've been thinking of adopting the Aussie "mate," because it's such a nice way of speaking informally with someone you don't necessarily know.

Sheesh. Why I'm in the mood to blather about "you" is beyond me.

Dave, my Texan relatives, including the ones from NOLA who married into the family, use "ya'll"; i've never heard "all ya'll" from them.

"Y'all" should only be aimed at small groups of people who know they're being addressed, i.e., in the room with the speaker. But like most internet communication, it gets a little fuzzy if you don't know who's in the room.

"All y'all" is a fine address for entire classes of people, but you need to tack the appropriate noun on the end for clarity:
"All y'all political types."
"All y'all Yankees."
"All y'all scientific-minded folk."
"All y'all Neptunians."

In certain neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago the plural of "you" is "yous" or sometimes "yous guys".

I thought you used "y'all" perfectly well. I tend to use "all y'all" only when I'm feeling expansive or enraged, like: "All y'all mofos better shut the hell up!"

The only unforgiveable sin is referring to a single person as "y'all," which drives me crazy whenever I see it in movies where some Yankee is putting on a bad Southern accent.

I haven't watched any cable news in two days, because I just couldn't bear it anymore. The photos I come across online are bad enough.

I didn't even listen to NPR on the way to work, and I'm too terrified to click on links on the news sites. I have reached some sort of horror overload.

With you on the undermediation, in fact got you beat: I don't even have broadcast TV, except in the cafeteria at work. Which doesn't stop me from spending all day glued to the internet being saturated with despair.

Also with you on Yankee appropriation of badly needed second person plural. And on missing formal/informal pronouns, though I think the net effect of the loss of "thou" in English may be a social positive.

"Youse" or "yez" is also Scots second person plural, e.g.:

"So ur yez all comin tae the pub or is it just some a yez?"

I think I've known native Southerners who've used "y'all" to refer to a single person. But I was never clear on when that was okay and when it wasn't.

Like Ben, I don't get any TV channels of any kind. But yeah, I've been watching Katrina news nearly nonstop online all week.

And here I thought, when I heard it in that Freeway movie, that 'all y'all' was clearly a joke.